Archive for October 11th, 2015

With right-wing media anointing Paul Ryan the next Speaker, it falls to Paul Krugman to remind us who Paul Ryan is:

As the Paul Ryan clamor gets louder, a public service reminder: he’s a con man.

I don’t mean that I disagree with his policy ideas, although I do. I mean that his reputation as a serious thinker is based on deception, both about what he has actually proposed and how it has or hasn’t been vetted.

Take, for example, the famous “fiscally responsible” budget plan. As I explained way back when, what Ryan did was to present a sort of vague fiscal outline to the Congressional Budget Office that envisioned implausibly large cuts in spending and mysterious increases in revenue, and stipulated for the purpose of the exercise that CBO take those numbers as given.
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…as I’ve said, Ryan is to budget analysis as Carly Fiorina is to corporate leadership: he’s brilliant at self-promotion, but there’s no hint that he’s actually able to do the job.

In short, Paul Ryan is the image of the sensible conservative that the Republican Party wants to project. Behind the image, there is nothing beyond a grasping nature and a lust for power. Conservatism died long ago, and left a formaldehyde-saturated lump of meat whose face is someone, perhaps Paul Ryan.

Poor Kevin McCarthy. Blamed for giving away the game that the Benghazi investigation was purely political. Now an investigator of the committee, Major Bradley F. Podliska, has filed a complaint over his firing, alleging that he was actually trying to investigate what happened and the committee impeded him.

But it gets stranger. Podliska is a Republican and plans to vote for the GOP nominee.

Even though he’s a witness to one of the most serious abuses of power that can be done by a political faction, the misuse of the investigative power of a committee to prevent finding out how Americans were killed.